In between the fantastical masterpieces “Beauty and the Beast” (1946) and “Orpheus” (1950), Jean Cocteau directed two films not frequently seen in the United States: “The Eagle With Two Heads” (1948), a quasi-medieval romance, and “Les Parents Terribles” (also 1948), a contemporary family melodrama. “Parents,” which sometimes goes by the English-language title “The Storm Within,” makes its U.S. premiere in New York this week in a fine-looking restoration.

Cocteau adapted this film from his own play. It depicts a petit bourgeois household: Georges (Marcel André) an ineffectual patriarch and would-be inventor; Yvonne (Yvonne de Bray) a diabetic who is introduced passed out in front of a sink, having botched her insulin injection; Léo (Gabrielle Dorziat), Yvonne’s sister and a former lover of Georges, who appears to possess the family’s only income; and finally Michel (Jean Marais), the son, in his 20s, whom Yvonne dotes on.

Conversing with Léo about Michel’s whereabouts (he has spent the night away from home), Yvonne is terrified that her son might have a lover. Those fears are realized when Michel bounces into the apartment and tells his mom about his girl, Madeleine (Josette Day, who co-starred with Marais in “Beauty and the Beast”). Additionally, Madeleine is trying to get out from under a sugar daddy, who happens to be Georges. “Whether comedy or tragedy, it’s a masterpiece,” Georges says to Léo as they try to construct a web of lies to hide the truth from Michel and Yvonne.

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A preview of the film.Published OnMay 21, 2018

The joke, as it turns out, is that there are no real secrets and there’s nothing genuinely at stake. Or at least there isn’t until one or another character arbitrarily concludes that everything’s ruined. As silly and trivial-minded as these characters are (Marais, so imposing in his incarnations as Cocteau’s Beast and Orpheus, does superb work playing a simpering dolt), Cocteau’s dramatic model, as ever, never strays too far from Greek tragedy and resolves appropriately.

The influential French critic André Bazin called this film one in which “the notion of the ‘shot’ is finally disposed of.” I wouldn’t go quite that far, but the unobtrusive formal virtuosity on display here — particularly the fluidity of the shooting and cutting (the cinematographer was Michel Kelber, the editor Jacqueline Sadoul) — demonstrates Cocteau’s unique command of the medium. The fact that he directed fewer than a dozen films makes this one a very special treasure now.